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Nvidia finds itself in hot water as the debate surrounding its GTX 970 graphics card rages on, with the firm now facing a class action lawsuit, as reported by PC World. The suit alleges that Nvidia "engaged in a scheme to mislead consumers nationwide about the characteristics, qualities and benefits of the GTX 970", citing incorrect specs supplied to the tech press. Plaintiff Andrew Ostrowski bought two GTX 970s, and apparently "soon after installing these devices in his personal computer, Plaintiff noticed that when using a high resolution monitor, the devices caused applications to slow, sputter and cease working. He also noticed that video games requiring higher levels of performance would not work properly."We recommend Anandtech's deep-dive on the subject for a more in-depth discussion on the specs, and the implications on performance, but the bottom line is this: the GTX 970 ships with 56 ROPs, not 64 as previously indicated while L2 cache is reduced from 2MB to 1.75MB. However, the big point of contention concerns the 4GB of onboard GDDR5 memory, which is split into two partitions of 3.5GB and 512MB respectively. Bandwidth on the larger area is now rated at 192GB/s rather than the 224GB/s previously advertised. It's the last 512MB that causes the real concern though - it only runs at 28GB/s. In a world where games now often recommend over 3GB of video RAM for 1080p gameplay, the suggestion is that running at higher resolutions can see memory utilisation move into the slower area of RAM, causing stutter.
We've been looking into this issue where time allows for a while now. We've even re-benched the GTX 970 across more titles for our recent graphics card upgrade guide, and found that the card operates as it should, whether we are running at 1080p or 2560x1440 (1440p). All of our benchmarks use FCAT frame-time analysis, so every single frame output by the GPU is rated and visualised. Here we see that the GTX 970 is effectively a slower version of the 980, without any additional frame-time variance. However, there's a multitude of potential PC settings that could put more demands on the area of slower RAM, and that might cause issues.
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